Jacqueline White

Warm, charming leading lady of 1940s films, Jacqueline White was under contract to both MGM (which wasted her in mostly unbilled bits) and then RKO, where she appeared in two classics--Crossfire (1947) and The Narrow Margin (1952). RKO used her as a second lead in A pictures and leading roles in Bs. She retired in 1950 upon her marriage to Bruce Anderson and they relocated to Wyoming, where her husband started an oil business. When she returned to Los Angeles for the birth of her first child, she was spotted in the RKO commissary visiting friends by director Richard Fleischer and producer Stanley Rubin, who offered her a co-starring role in "The Narrow Margin". The film, widely acknowledged to be one of the classics of "film noir", sat on the RKO shelf for two years while studio boss Howard Hughes considered whether to extensively edit it or re-shoot it as an "A" with Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell. Eventually, selected scenes were reshot and added in December 1951, nearly a year after the film had originally wrapped--she was flown out from her home in Casper, Wyoming, for these added scenes--and the film was, thankfully, spared any more of Hughes' "improvements". It was released mostly intact due to director Fleischer's striking a deal with Hughes to release the picture without further changes in return for Fleischer's reshooting the end of His Kind of Woman (1951). Long retired from the film industry, Jacqueline has recently begun appearing at film festivals and conventions.